


Seeing Ghosts

by suwasha



Category: Original Work
Genre: Ghosts, Paranormal, Possible Schizophrenia, poc!narrator, posible hallucinations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 13:54:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13591464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suwasha/pseuds/suwasha
Summary: This is trash tbh but pls read and critique





	Seeing Ghosts

When my mother was younger, she saw ghosts. She didn’t realize it at first. To her, it seemed like they were ordinary people - she could see them and hear them and talk to them. Ghosts of all shapes, sizes, and ages; some she knew and some she did not; she saw them all. She would see her great-great-grandmother on some occasions, in the old rocking chair in the sitting room, and often would find the old family cat, underneath the mantle on top of which a very picture of him was sitting. In the backyard, she played with a girl of her age or a bit older, who wore a dusty dress but had the brightest pink of ribbons in her hair. She especially liked the old man who sat on the bench across from her school. Every day, she would greet him and he would tip his boater hat to her, whistling a tune that she always loved and looked forward to.

Like their living counterparts, the ghosts weren’t all nice. The creep in the end stall of girls’ bathroom at her school would stare at her through the cracks in the stalls and make lewd comments about little girls. The younger man outside of the bodega would follow her into the store and harass her for her money. Even in her own house, her grandfather would make rackets in his old room, muttering under his breath nonsense about ‘coons’ and ‘half-caste grandchildren.’

She didn’t realize that she was unusual until people began to give her shady looks for talking to thin air, and her parents took her to shrinks for seeing things nobody else could. The shrinks had various explanations: sleep paralysis, though she saw them without having to fall asleep; hallucinations from some childhood trauma; though she had lived a fairly uneventful and happy life; delusions; though the ghosts were far too real to be unreal. Her parents took her out of school and put her on all sorts of medication, and when those didn’t “cure” her, they turned to alternative methods. They went to various voodoo doctors and witches, but even that magic would not fix my mother, not the way her parents wanted it to, at least. Dad thinks it was the magic that changed her… that caused the incident.

When my mother was nineteen, her parents deemed her well enough to take her on a road trip across the country. Three hours into the drive, she wakes up from the nap she fell into, rather frazzled and shaken up, speaking incoherently about a woman they hit in the middle of the road and constantly repeating, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Confused and scared, her parents eventually managed to convince her that they had hit no woman, no person at all, and they weren’t going to. Even then, my mother’s fears couldn’t let them continue driving through the night. The next few nights, she had the same recurring dream, each time more vivid and surreal. It drove her to the point where she would keep herself from sleeping, consuming unhealthy amounts of caffeine. Her parents caught on to this soon and forced sleeping pills into her before they started the next leg of their trip.

She was in the backseat as usual, behind the passenger seat, reclined against the window to her right, staring through the one opposite her at the silhouettes of the trees passing by. She could vaguely hear the radio while her father sang along and her mother laughed. She would have joined in had she not been overcome so suddenly with a sense of impending doom.

She shot up in her seat, startling her mother, and searched through the darkness ahead of the car for something she could not name. However, she knew the moment she saw the figure in the road, and screamed for her father to stop, but it was too late. In an attempt to avoid the figure, her father had swerve into the woods and hit a tree, but my mother worried little about the car and her parents. She raced out of the vehicle and to the figure in the road. The figure was crumpled and folded over, like a rag doll, and barely moving. Upon moving closer, my mother discovered it was a woman, but a different woman than in her dreams, and she reached out to help her.

It was then that everything changed indefinitely. When she touched the woman, my mother crippled over in excruciating pain; her lungs felt like they had burst, her very organs and bones on fire. The pain was so acute and intense, my mother would have done anything to die in that moment, but she wasn’t put out of her misery. Though the pain was still as fierce, my mother forced her eyes opened and saw a sight she had never seen before. She saw the woman’s soul transcending, to where she could only imagine, and it was the most frightening experience. She passed out then, and awoke three weeks later in a hospital in the next town.

Since then, my mother has been searching for the woman in her dream. She married my dad after he spent years helping her. When she gave birth to me, she stopped looking, thinking it actually was a delusion. But lately she’s been drawing the woman from her dream in her sketchbooks, page after page. The same woman in different angles and scenes. But she never lets anyone see her drawings for some reason. Dad told me that he sneaked a look and he found the woman looks exactly like me. That part wouldn’t be so alarming to me if I hadn’t started seeing the ghosts myself.

**Author's Note:**

> This is trash tbh but pls read and critique


End file.
